


Underneath the Devil’s Cupped Hand

by Gimmie



Category: Teen Wolf (TV)
Genre: Alternate Universe, M/M, supernatural!stiles
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2019-02-15
Updated: 2019-02-15
Packaged: 2019-10-28 22:57:07
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,410
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/17796332
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Gimmie/pseuds/Gimmie
Summary: “I live here,” Derek said, choking a little in startlement.The kid made a snort of a sound that reverberated. “Not anymore. Get out of my city.” He pointed to the highway.AKA~Derek has been away from his territory too long; someone else has taken over.





	Underneath the Devil’s Cupped Hand

The creatures clawed at him, bounding in and out like cowards to take swipes, slashing him open. He was covered in gouges that stung and wept blood. Derek bared his fangs and flashed his red eyes, ripped the spine out of one of them, and they skittered away from him. 

He stumbled down the wet pavement, wondering where they had come from, and what they were. He’d been away from Beacon Hills for two years and his hometown had apparently gotten an infestation, and being the only one of the Hale pack left, that made it his problem.

Something was here, something stronger than the horde of petty creatures. The further down the dark street Derek walked, the more some power raised the hairs on his arms, and Derek got the feeling that he may be an alpha, but he wasn’t _the_ alpha around here. There was something bigger and scarier than him lurking in the blackness up ahead.

Derek walked forward to face it. What else could he do? Call for help? Everyone that he knew was dead. Besides, Derek had always been one to take problems head on. It was the only way he knew to do things.

The power suddenly arrived, no longer a vague, malevolent force in the near distance, but right there, pressing on him like a storm cloud.

It stepped out of the shadows, and Derek blinked at the teenaged kid that appeared. He was lean and shirtless, with a black hoody open and framing his chest. Everything he was wearing was black, and the contrast made his skin stand out white in the moonlight. His eyes were dark and unfriendly, his hair spiky and strewn, like Derek had rung his doorbell at three in the morning and he was not impressed.

The kid’s power was still pressing on him, heavy on his skin. Derek felt weighed down by it. 

“Why are you here?” the kid asked, in a rumble of a voice that didn’t match his looks, like some dour guardian of the city. There seemed to be an echo, like something sinister was doing a voice over. The feeling of his voice was uncomfortable, vibrating Derek’s ribs and making his vision shake briefly like he was looking through an unsteady camera.

“I live here,” Derek said, choking a little in startlement.

The kid made a snort of a sound that reverberated. “Not anymore. Get out of my city.”

Derek furrowed his brows at the command. The kid was bad news, but he had a brain, unlike the creatures that apparently came with him. Maybe he could be reasoned with. “It’s my city, too. My house is here.”

“Supernaturals are no longer welcome here.” The kid snarled it, red lips twisting and showing sharp teeth and fangs bigger than Derek’s.

“ _You’re_ supernatural,” Derek said, trying to sound reasonable, and probably failing.

The kid’s eyes flooded black and Derek knew he’d overstepped the thing’s patience, the inky color moving, covering its whole iris and spreading even further, until only tiny bits of whites showed in the corners. Its jaw opened, letting out a terrifying gust of sound and power that shook Derek’s bones, and made his eyes widen involuntarily. He scrambled backwards as the kid stalked toward him, the ground and air shaking with his power like the kid was t-rex instead of a scrawny teenager. The kid grabbed a telephone pole, fingers gripping like claws into the wood and splintering through to get a hold, and threw it, crushing a truck with a crash and knocking a fire hydrant off its spot with an earsplitting clang, water busting out and shooting up into the sky in a geyser. Lights all down the street snuffed out from the break in the power lines.

“Get. Out. And don’t come back.” He grabbed a dead street light and raised it, and Derek was off like a shot before the kid swung. He felt the air move at his back, the metal pole smashing into the ground and shattering, narrowly missing him and sending pieces of broken pavement exploding. The kid threw the rest of the broken pole that remained in his hands, and it clubbed Derek across the back and set him flying. He landed face first on the road and slid, the asphalt scraping skin off of his arms and face.

The ground was vibrating toward him again, and he scrambled up and sprinted, ignoring the pain in his back and bleeding skin.

The pack of creatures bounded back into the fray, seeing he was vulnerable, jumping onto Derek and clawing at him, digging into his skin and hanging like cats on curtains. The weight of dozens of them piling onto him almost crushed him to the ground, but he managed to throw some of them off and struggle free, getting a few more steps before they overwhelmed him again. 

He hit the ground face first, and they scattered. One second he was crawling under the press of them, then they suddenly flowed away like a receding tide, retreating back to their master.

Derek stood and turned, looking back and panting, everything in his body hurting. His eyes caught on the sign at the edge of the road next to him. ‘Entering Beacon Hills.’

He was at the limit of the city. Apparently the kid didn’t care about anything beyond the border. Or maybe he couldn’t cross it for some reason.

Derek was bruised and bleeding and missing some flesh, but that wasn’t anything he hadn’t been through before. He rolled his shoulders and waited for his body to heal a bit, thinking about getting a hold of a piece of that broken streetlight and stabbing it through the kid’s heart. It seemed like a solid plan to deal a death blow, as long as he could avoid dying before he’d accomplished it. 

When he felt strong enough to function, he stepped over the border back into the city, but as soon as his shoe touched the ground, the kid blurred into existence in front of him, like he could fucking teleport, and Derek knew with frightening clarity in that moment that the kid had let him go. Derek wasn’t just the underdog in a fight, he was a bug, and about to be crushed.

The kid made a swift motion of his hand, and an invisible force clenched around him, restricting his breathing, and lifted Derek’s body off of the ground. It held him spread-eagle, then smashed him down onto the road, leaving him no ability to put his arms out to protect himself — but maybe that was a mercy, as they would have broken anyway, like the rest of him. Sharp points of pain exploded everywhere, in his neck and ribs and limbs, combined immediately with the pain of shards of bone puncturing his lungs and other inner flesh in proximity to the breaks. He coughed, agony exploding through him from it, and tasted blood from the internal bleeding.

“I think you can survive this,” the kid said, considering, his echoey voice vibrating pain through Derek’s wounds and making him groan and let out an involuntary whine. 

“If I do it again — I think maybe you won’t.” He said it so casually that Derek couldn’t tell if he had decided to do it or not, if he was just thinking aloud, or warning him off. He waited there on the ground to see if the being standing over him would finish him. Gravel scraped under the kid’s shoes as he descended to sit on his heels and look over Derek with a cool, apathetic expression.

“Ask me a question,” he said, his voice vibrating through Derek.

“What,” Derek gasped, “are you?”

The kid reached out and placed hands on his back and Derek felt claws grow and puncture his skin, slide between his ribs. The kid raked them slowly and Derek screamed as his skin sliced open in long lines.

The kid sat back again, the hands hanging casually between his thighs red now, drops of Derek’s blood dripping from his fingers. 

“Ask me another question,” he said.

Derek whined, and tears blurred his vision. He kept his mouth shut.

“You are capable of learning after all,” the kid clucked. “I was beginning to wonder.”

Gravel scraped again as the kid stood up, wiping Derek’s blood off on his pants. He made a flick of a motion with two fingers and the air pressed around Derek’s body and lifted him upright onto his feet. Power entered him like wind through a screen and Derek cried out as bones moved and fit back together, feeling as if the seals were being burned into place with a soldering gun. He was left panting from the pain in the aftermath, but his body was strong enough to hold itself up again. Another flick of the kid’s fingers spun him on his feet to face him away from town.

“If I see your handsome face again, you’ll be a very, very sorry wolf.”

*

Derek holed up in a patch of dense forest next to the highway and licked his wounds, which three hours later were all the non-physical sort. He’d lost the Hale land that he grew up on — and the graves where his family were buried. 

He thought about Deaton. He wondered if the kid, whatever he was, had been able to tell that the vet wasn’t just human, and had evicted the emissary, too.

Deaton might know what the kid was. Derek sure as hell didn’t. He presented almost like a demon, but demons didn’t heal people unless the injured party signed their soul over on the dotted line, and they didn’t protect things like cities. The kid hadn’t even made a half-assed bid for Derek's soul.

Derek crawled to his feet and walked cautiously closer to Beacon Hills until his cell got a signal, and then he googled Deaton.

He apparently lived in San Francisco now. So, that answered that question. 

 

*****

 

“Beacon Hills is lost, Derek. Just walk away.”

Derek growled, squeezing the cell phone in his hand, because that wasn’t what he wanted to hear, or something he was willing to do. “What the hell is that thing?” he demanded. “ _Something_ has to be able to kill it.”

“That something is not you,” Deaton said, calmly.

“Then who?” Derek would track them down and get them here.

“Just be thankful that all he wants is the relatively tiny territory of Beacon Hills. He could have taken more. North America, for instance.”

“Maybe he’ll change his mind later,” Derek said, hoping to motivate the doc to take care of the problem before it got worse.

The doc didn’t take the bait. “Maybe,” was all he said, like it didn’t matter, that he would just accommodate the monster taking over whatever he wanted.

Derek growled again, his free hand clenching. “How does it _die_?”

“When he makes his choice, he’ll be taken from this plane of existence into the next.”

Derek remembered, then, why he hated talking to the doc. Deaton liked to be enigmatic and make you ask a hundred stupid questions to get any information. “What choice?” he asked, leading the emissary inch by inch, trying to hold onto his thinning patience. 

“Whether he wants to be a devil, or an angel.”

 

*

Derek sat in a tree and watched Beacon Hills. He wasn’t ready to walk away from it yet, but he couldn’t bring himself to try to step over that city limit, either. Derek had a higher pain threshold than most, but being broken into a hundred pieces wasn’t something he was willing to voluntarily feel again, and he would be stupid not to believe that the kid would escalate the punishment if Derek kept disobeying. He had no doubt he would be a very sorry wolf if he faced the kid on Beacon Hills land again.

He didn’t know how the Powers That Be could be undecided about whether the kid was a devil. If that was what possible-angels were like, Derek didn’t think the definition that he’d grown up with was even close.

Utility workers were on the scene fixing the power line, and police were checking out the blood stains Derek had left and trying to figure out what the heck had happened. It would likely forever be a mystery to the humans, unless the thing decided to show itself to them.

A shiver crossed his skin and the hairs on his arms stood up. Dread pulled his guts down at the familiar sensation, and Derek looked toward the source, standing on the hillside above the highway. He thought a heartfelt _oh, shit_ and took an automatic step back as his eyes ran from the kid’s shoes up to his face, but the kid was looking down on the official activities below, watching the police work. He seemed passive, uncaring that Derek was nearby. Derek had no illusions about being undetected, glad he was still on the other side of the city limit line, but he was being thoroughly ignored. He stared, just watching the kid stand there and look down on the humans below. 

A car door creaked open, and Derek’s eyes drew to a sheriff’s cruiser sitting on the highway next to the Beacon Hills city limit sign. 

The man closed the door after himself and walked up to the part of the road where Derek’s blood stain was a dark blemish on the grey pavement. He raised a foot as if to step, but then fell back. He wandered along across the empty road, feeling the air like a mime.

The demon was keeping the humans prisoner? Surely Deaton wouldn’t let that stand?

The sheriff put his hands out and pushed, and the air bounced him back. The man muttered and turned back. He waved and called out. “Hey, McCabe. Check out this spatter.”

The deputy came over and looked down at the blood. “Roadkill?”

“Let’s hope so. But, considering.” He waved in the general vicinity of the damage. “Better check it out. I’m gonna…” he sighed and looked down the highway, then flopped his hand at his side helplessly. “Head back to the station and do some paperwork.”

“Okay, boss.” McCabe stepped over the border without incident, and squatted to examine the blood.

Derek cocked his head and watched the sheriff walk back to his cruiser; then he looked at the demon on the hill.


End file.
